TODAY I fell like Alice. Through the strata of the years, Sediment beds laid down by Memory and imagination. They form my own lithology. Layers of wasted Time: echoes of Meaning, moments of moment, Decades of purposelessness. Pressed down hurts long remembered, Friends long forgotten. Whispers of opal in the sandstone: Pleasure ~ a ridiculous word ~ Flirting, smirking, of Victorian naughtiness. ‘They pleasured each other’, Most likely by accident, seeking Their own satisfaction. Desert times. The igneous flash of The hot sins ~ lust, anger, now tempered By age and indolence. Yet the afterglow, the lava flow Remains, finding itself surprised ~ Not by joy ~ but by shame and irritation. Change came with cool calculation. Tears calcified like grouting, Keeping together or forcing apart. Revenge, hard with loathing, Wrong choices, options unnoticed Blocked by the terminal moraine, Paper and ashes, boxes and dust, Paintings and porcelain, chairs, books, Picked up somewhere. Possibly with someone. Phrases call from nowhere: ‘Like a wine-skin in the frost’, Cromarty, Forties, German Bight. ‘Reader, I married him’. Clothes not worn, wine untasted, Promises broken or ~ Worse ~ promises kept. Emotion, attraction, encoded in Mere letters and numbers. Fabric, settlement, sentiment and, Amid the detritus, the off-scouring Of a life observed, I stand.
Retwords 